*** Welcome to piglix ***

Peter Mazur

Peter Mazur
Petermazur1.jpg
Mazur lecturing on non-equilibrium thermodynamics in Trondheim, 1967
Born December 11, 1922
Vienna, Austria
Died August 15, 2001(2001-08-15) (aged 78)
Lausanne, Switzerland
Residence Flag of the Netherlands.svg Netherlands
Nationality Flag of the Netherlands.svg Dutch
Fields Physicist
Institutions University of Leiden
Alma mater University of Utrecht
Doctoral advisor Sybren de Groot
Known for non-equilibrium thermodynamics

Peter Mazur (b. Vienna, Austria, December 11, 1922 – d. Lausanne, Switzerland, August 15, 2001) was an Austrian-born, Dutch physicist and one of the founders of the field of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. He is the father of Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur.

Peter Mazur was born on December 11, 1922 in Vienna, Austria. His father, Karl Georg Mazur, a business man, and mother, Anna Zula Lecker, frequently moved during Mazur's youth. In 1931 the family left for Berlin, where Mazur attended the Franzősisches Gymnasium. Two years later the family left Germany to escape the growing threat of National Socialism. After spending one year in Switzerland they moved to Paris where Mazur attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly. In 1939 Mazur moved to The Hague in the Netherlands, but in 1940 the occupying Nazis no longer permitted Jews to live near the seacoast and the family moved to Zeist. In 1942 Mazur and his family went into hiding and he spent three years on various farms in the Dutch countryside. One month after the liberation of the Netherlands at the end of World War II, Mazur was reunited with his parents.

After the end of the war, Mazur studied Chemistry at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In 1951, Mazur obtained his doctorate under the direction of Sybren de Groot with a thesis entitled, "Thermodynamics of Transport Phenomena in Liquid Helium-2". The results were in good agreement with experiments done at the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory in Leiden, the Netherlands.

After a period as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1953, Mazur became an associate professor at Leiden University in 1954. In 1955, he and de Groot, who had also moved to Leiden, founded the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leiden University. In 1961, Mazur became a full professor, and when de Groot left in 1963, he became director of the institute. He filled this position in his own distinctive way for 25 years until he became emeritus in 1988. Under the direction of de Groot and Mazur, the institute grew substantially and eventually established the Lorentz Chair, a prestigious special professorship.


...
Wikipedia

...